Rami Khouri with a poster of the late Semir Kassir who was assassinated

Having been born in New York in October 1948, I have experienced exile from Palestine as a normal life condition, but over the years I have found it to be more of a physical and political than a psychological condition. Ironically, exile enhances one’s national identity as a Palestinian, and prods us to develop new ways to manifest that identity.

The hardest thing about a life in exile is having to come to grips with long-term estrangement from your homeland while also fighting to regain the right to live a normal life one day in that same land. The great yet elusive lifelong battle is for repatriation and normal life in one’s own country. The struggle is immense and often depressing when crushing Israeli occupation, Western indifference and irresponsibility, and our own mediocre Palestinian leaders and other political actors make Palestine a place of constant conflict and suffering.

The reality of this dual dilemma of personal displacement and exile alongside an often unsettled situation in Palestine itself leaves us only one choice as Palestinian men and women: to work hard to achieve success and fulfilment in our personal and professional lives, so that we can collectively assist both the national cause as well as individual Palestinians whose basic needs are often unmet. The antidote to communal national denial is personal self-improvement, collective solidarity and assistance, and faith that hard work and honest endeavours will one day replace our exile with national reconstitution and sovereignty in our own land.

Exile was a sudden shock and collective trauma for our parents’ generation in 1948, but for those of us born in 1948 and beyond, exile was an inheritance. Adjusting to it was another rite of passage into adulthood. It was something that was learned slowly and gradually, as one eventually realized that he or she somehow was not part of the many collective identities encountered while growing up.

The process of discovering in adolescence that you are a Palestinian comes episodically, usually by a process of elimination. You realize that your accent is unlike that of Syrians, Jordanians, Lebanese, or Egyptians, even though your culture is similar to them all. You realize that even though you are legally a citizen of other countries - in my case Jordan and the United States - and you are grateful for that important privilege, the nationalistic heartstrings and yearning for citizenship both emanate from your Palestinian identity. You understand the wider and more terrible human cost of exile when you see repeated images of Palestinians in the most miserable conditions, year after year, in refugee camps throughout the Arab world, under siege in occupied lands, or constantly on the run because their homes are bombed or they are convenient scapegoats for other people’s anger and fears.

You figure out after a while that border police and immigration officers in the Arab world who ask you about your “country of origin” when they see your American, Jordanian, or other passport are not doing this purely for statistical purposes, but rather because they want to know if you are a Palestinian. I now no longer play this game, and answer that my country of origin is Yemen, Syria, Palestine, the United States, and Jordan - the five lands of my ancestors and of my own life since the 18^th century. One of the bittersweet aspects of exile and life without organic links to your ancestral homeland is that you develop a capacity to adapt and live in different countries and cultures.

Being a citizen of the world is a pleasant feeling in many ways -- I am as comfortable cheering for the New York Yankees at a baseball game in the Bronx or playing foosball with migrant workers in a Geneva café as I am listening to Ilham Madfaai on my iPod as I eat a shawarma sandwich while strolling down Hamra Street in Beirut. Yet I would rather have chosen this globalist life, rather than have it imposed on me by the condition of our collective Palestinian exile, statelessness, and disenfranchisement.

One of the consequences of permanent exile is the adoption of a universal set of principles and values that many communities have experienced over time, most spectacularly the ancient Hebrews in Babylon in the 6^th century BC. It is to maintain your communal and national identity, keep faith in your eventual return to wholesome, indigenous nationhood, and in the meantime codify the laws and values that can define a stable, satisfying, and humane society. In the absence of nationhood, exile teaches us, we should aspire to decency and law-abiding values in both our personal lives and the wider organization of our communities.

This provides a useful alternative context for getting on with life, despite the burdens and constraints of exile and statelessness.

The most effective form of nationalist struggle, it turns out, is personal and professional achievement. Politicians, national leaders, resistance fighters, and civil society groups all do their part to win the battle of Palestinian national reconstitution and self-determination, with mixed results to date. We do not know if exile will stretch into centuries or end sometime soon. In the meantime, ordinary Palestinians everywhere in the world live with nationalism and normal statehood as an aspiration that they expect to achieve and instead embrace education, professionalism, and stoic human decency as the defining contours and drivers of their daily lives.